Mar 2014
No.188
Myths of the Great War
Mark Harrison
WORKING PAPER SERIES
Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy
Department of Economics
Myths of the Great War
Mark Harrison*
Department of Economics and CAGE, University of Warwick
Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University
Abstract
We review some “myths” of the Great War of 1914 to 1918: that the war
broke out inadvertently, that the western front saw needless slaughter,
that the Allies used the food weapon to strangle Germany, and that the
peace treaty that ended the war caused the rise of Hitler and the still
greater war that followed.
Keywords: economic mobilization, hyperinflation, interdependence,
rational calculation, strategic interaction, reparations, war of attrition.
JEL Codes: F51, N14.
Acknowledgments
This paper is a draft for a plenary lecture to the Economic History Society
at the University of Warwick on 28 March 2014. I thank Bishnupriya
Gupta and the programme committee for the invitation; Karen Brandon,
Dan Bernhardt, Nick Crafts, and Vlad Kontorovich for helpful
conversations; and Major and Mrs Holt, Bruce Bairnsfather's biographers,
for permission to reproduce the image shown in Figure 1.
* Mail: Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry
CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. Email: mark.harrison@warwick.ac.uk.
This version: 27 March 2014.
Myths of the Great War
I love stories on the news about Vera Lynn, evacuees, rationing, all
that fun stuff. But I don’t mean to be rude, but just I don’t want to hear
more about the mud, the trenches, the barbed wire and the massive
loss of life (respondent quoted by British Future 2013: 16).
In Bruce Bairnsfather’s celebrated cartoon, two infantrymen of the Great
War cower in a foxhole while shells fly overhead (Figure 1). One says to
the other: “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.” Their passive
misery captures much of how the Great War is remembered today.
Most wars are rich in tales of agency and decision. Yet many tales of
the Great War are told otherwise. A dominant narrative of the Great War
tells us that we were passive victims of an irrational disaster: Everything
that happened was done to us; we scarcely know by whom.
Perceptions of the Great War continue to resonate in today’s world of
international politics and policy. Most obviously, does China’s rise show a
parallel with Germany’s a century ago? Will China’s rise, unlike
Germany’s, remain peaceful? The Financial Times journalist Gideon
Rachman wrote last year:
The analogy [of China today] with Germany before the first world war
is striking … It is, at least, encouraging that the Chinese leadership has
made an intense study of the rise of great powers over the ages – and
is determined to avoid the mistakes of both Germany and Japan.”1
The idea that China’s leaders wish to avoid Germany’s mistakes is
encouraging, certainly.2 But what are the “mistakes,” exactly, that they
will now seek to avoid? The world can hardly be reassured if we
ourselves, social scientists and historians, remain uncertain what
mistakes were made and even whether they were mistakes in the first
place.
“The shadow of 1914 falls over the Pacific,” Financial Times,
February 4, 2013.
1
While much attention has been focused on China’s rise and the
German parallel, less has been given to Russia’s decline, which in some
ways resembles that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and has no less
disturbing implications: two sprawling, multi-national empires, struggling
to manage a fall from past greatness, rising ethnic tensions, and external
rivals competing for influence in bordering states.
2
This version: 27 March 2014.
2
The myths of the Great War challenge the skills of both historians and
economists. Historians face the challenge of preserving and extending the
record and contesting its interpretation – especially when reasonable
people differ over the meaning. If anything challenges the economist, it is
surely persistence in behaviour that is both costly and apparently futile or
self-defeating.
Closer study of the historical record of the Great War reveals a story
full of foresight, intention, calculation, and causation. Some consequences
that are commonly thought to have been unintended were considered
beforehand and fully discounted; others were not consequences at all.
Myth #1. An inadvertent war
Interviewed earlier this year at Davos, Japanese premier Shinzo Abe
likened China and Japan today to Britain and Germany in 1913.3 He
commented on the similarity of their rivalry. He noted that they shared a
strong trading relationship and that a century ago this had not prevented
strategic tensions leading to the outbreak of conflict. Today, he concluded,
any “inadvertent” conflict would be a disaster.
Historians and politicians have focused on moral responsibility for the
war. Whom should we blame? In 1918 Lloyd George demanded “Trial of
the Kaiser” (Purcell 2006: 75). By 1920 he had changed his mind. In a
later memoir (Lloyd George 1938: 32) he wrote:
The nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war
without any trace of apprehension or dismay.
The allocation of moral blame for the Great War is still debated. A recent
survey of ten professional historians (BBC 2014) placed Germany first in
line with 9 votes (out of 10), but with many also-rans: Austria-Hungary (7
votes), Russia and Serbia (3 each), and Britain and France (2 each). Two
of the ten gave equal weight to all the belligerents.
From a social-science perspective the underlying issue is less moral
than empirical: Was the Great War truly an “inadvertent” conflict, one that
started when no one was looking? When the actors decided on war, to
what extent did they calculate their actions and intend the results? The
“Davos leaders: Shinzo Abe on WW1 parallels, economics and
women at work,” Financial Times, January 22, 2014. Subsequently the
Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi was reported as rejecting the parallel
on the following grounds: “1. The parallel is a misleading one. Military
conflict is now unthinkable. 2. Japan caused the second world war. This is
unambiguous.” “Davos: China rejects Abe’s WW1 analogy,” Financial
Times, January 24, 2014.
3
3
economist’s standard model of strategic interaction demands evidence of
individual agency (rather than of unconscious collective drives), of
unbiased “rational” expectations, and of backward induction of one’s own
best choice based on the expected best choice of the adversary.
It is a myth that such calculations were absent from the decision for
war. On the contrary the record shows that the war was brought about
very largely by design, and among those that designed it there was
realistic foresight of the scale, scope, character, duration, and even
outcome of the war.
Several versions of the Great War deny or qualify agency. These are
traditional stories of nationalism, imperialism, and coordination failure.
According to them, national leaders were trapped into actions they did
not intend by commercial interests, the demands of the mob, and alliance
commitments. In fact the historical record has left clear evidence of
agency and intention.
In every country the decision for war was made by a handful – literally
– of people at the apex of each political system (Hamilton and Herwig
2004: 238-241). Their councils were “saturated with agency” (Clark 2013:
xxvii). The cliques themselves were not united, so that there were also
waverers in every country including the German, Austrian, and Russian
emperors, the German premier Bethmann Holweg, and the British finance
minister (later premier) Lloyd George. At crucial moments, however,
those that favoured war were able to sway the others.
An implication is that the war was not inevitable. Minor variations in
the course of events and the personalities involved might have had
different outcomes. The Sarajevo assassination killed a voice for peace in
Vienna and also made it more difficult for similar voices to be heard
(Fromkin 2007: 154). In the powerful words of Margaret MacMillan
(2013: 605): “There are always choices.”
No one was swayed by commercial interests, which were against the
war in all countries (Hamilton and Herwig 2004: 241-248), or by public
opinion more widely, which was taken by surprise (Ferguson 1999: 1742011). Public opinion was considered, only to bolster the legitimacy of the
actions the actors had decided to take anyway. In Germany, for example,
Moltke (cited by MacMillan 2013: 480) wrote to Bethmann Holweg after
the so-called “imperial war council” of December 1912 that “we can …
face even the most difficult tasks with confidence, if we manage to
formulate the casus belli in such a way that the nation will take up arms
unitedly and enthusiastically.” No one was trapped into war by alliance
commitments. Instead, they considered carefully whether or not to
honour them, or even went beyond them. Thus in its “blank cheque” to
Austria, Germany went far beyond its alliance obligation. Italy, in contrast,
went to war in 1915 against its former allies. Nor were they trapped into
4
war by the pressure of mobilization timetables; in both Berlin and St
Petersburg, the war advocates exploited the timetables to force the
waverers to commit to war (e.g. Herwig 1977: 25).
What ruled the calculation in every country was the national interest
as they perceived it. But on what was the “national interest” based? As
everywhere, on shared beliefs and values.4 These began with national
identity, in which the well-being of the nation was commonly identified
with persistence of the ruling order. They extended to shared values of
power, status, honour, and influence, and then to shared beliefs about the
forces underlying the distribution of power in the world. Strikingly, the
decision makers in every country were subscribers to a virtual world
where the zero-sum game of power was being played out, not the
positive-sum game of commerce and development.
There is clear evidence that some of the actors had a specific intent to
bring about a war. Two things muddy the water. One is the efforts made
later to destroy the evidence and distort the record (Herwig 1987).
Another is that those that intended war did not have the same war in
mind, although they still understood the wider conflict that could follow
(Fromkin 2007). In Vienna chief of the general staff Hötzendorf and
foreign minister Berchtold intended war with Serbia in order to assert the
integrity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, knowing that the Russians
might intervene and so widen the conflict. In Berlin chief of the general
staff Moltke and war minister Falkenhayn planned war with Russia before
the Russian rearmament would be completed, knowing that this would
also entail war with France. To bring war about, they also encouraged
each other: when the Germans encouraged the Austrians to make war on
Serbia in July 1914 among them were those that expected this would
provide the best opportunity to attack France and Russia (Hamilton and
Herwig 2004; Fromkin 2007). Similarly, the Russians and French egged
each other on, although the Russians had their eyes on Austria and the
French on Germany (McMeekin 2013: 54).
Is it true that everyone expected a short war? According to a Financial
Times Editorial for New Year’s Day, 2014:
On the “national interest” see Hamilton and Herwig (2004: 239). A
much praised history by Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers (2013: 560),
also comments on the idea of shared political culture: “we should [not]
minimize the belligerence and imperialist paranoia of the Austrian and
German policy-makers … But the Germans were not the only imperialists
and not the only ones to succumb to paranoia. The crisis that bought war
in 1914 was the fruit of a shared political culture.” Use of terms such as
“belligerence” and “paranoia” conveys Clark’s agenda, more moral than
investigative.
4
5
In 1914 some European politicians and generals, their outlook shaped
by the limited wars that had unified Germany and Italy half a century
earlier, harboured this illusion.5
But it was not, in the main, “politicians and generals” that suffered from
the illusion. It was mainly the ordinary uninformed citizens that expected
a short war. The “short war” illusion arose from the warnings of Bloch
(1899) and Angell (1910) about the destructive force of modern warfare
and the dependence of prosperity on economic interdependence. The
military had heard the warning and had discounted it (Macmillan 2013:
305-306). In reality the idea of a short war was not so much a shared
illusion as a shared hope: starting from Schlieffen, everyone hoped the
war could be short.
Military planners also realistically evaluated the likelihood that such
hopes would fail. Schlieffen’s staff warned that quick victory might well be
replaced by “a tedious and bloody crawling forward step-by-step” (Clark
2013: 561). Updating German war plans in 1905 and 1906, Moltke
himself envisaged one possible outcome as “a people’s war, one which
would not be concluded in a single battle” but a “murderous European
war,” a “general European massacre, at whose horror one could only
shudder,” a “long and protracted struggle” that would continue until “the
peoples’ energy had been entirely broken”; if victorious, Germany would
still be “exhausted in the extreme” (Herwig 2002: 688-692). Preparing for
war, German administrators planned how to feed the population under
blockade (Lee 1975). Moltke himself explained that respecting Dutch
neutrality would provide Germany’s “wind pipe,” or neutral channel to
overseas trade (Herwig 2002: 689. These considerations made sense only
in the expectation of a protracted war in which national resources would
be mobilized and brought to bear.
Across the Channel in August 1914, while others expected a short war,
war secretary Kitchener thought “if things go wrong the war might last
two or three years at least” (cited by French 1988: 387). Prime minister
Asquith anticipated “Armageddon.” French and Russian generals looked
forward to the “extinction of civilization” (Clark 2013: 561).
In strategic interaction, the principle of backward induction requires
each player to work out the best choice from predicting their adversaries’
likely responses. To what extent did the Great Powers do this in 1914?
Within the governing cliques of the Great Powers, each had reasonable
understanding of the others’ war plans, based on open signals and
confirmed by covert intelligence (Macmillan 2013: 314-352). That is, each
5
“Reflections on the Great War,” Financial Times, January 1, 2014.
6
government shared a broad understanding that, if Austria attacked Serbia,
Russia would probably mobilize against Austria and Germany; Germany
would probably attack France as well as Russia; and Britain would
probably come in on the side of France (Herwig 2002). Austrian foreign
minister Berchtold promoted aggression “even though our operations
against Serbia should bring about the great war.” From Berlin, Wilhelm II
told Vienna to count on “Germany’s full support”; he wrote that Germany
fully expected war with Russia and for years had made all preparations
with this in mind.
Each country’s likely reaction was not known with certainty, and there
are well known moments when they were misread. But the theory of
deterrence (Schelling 1966 92-125) does not require certainty; indeed,
deterrence is thought to be more effective when each side retains some
discretion. Of course, leaving the adversary in a state of uncertainty is not
the same thing as being uncertain oneself, and the latter condition
reflected the influence of the waverers.
To what extent were the war makers simply over-optimistic? In this
context, over-optimism would have a specific meaning: that the sum of
probabilities of expected victory among the great powers would exceed
one. Evidence of over-optimism is strikingly absent among those that
brought the war about in Berlin and Vienna. Possibly there was overoptimism in St Petersburg: both Russians and Germans overestimated
how quickly Russia might became stronger than Germany. In the present,
however, both German and Austrian leaders had clear premonitions of
defeat (Berghahn 1973; 2013; Ferguson 1999: 13; 2005: 19). As war
began, German war minister Falkenhayn put it: “Even if we go under as a
result of this, it still was beautiful.”. In Vienna Hötzendorf told his
mistress: “It will be a hopeless struggle, but … such an ancient monarchy
and such an ancient army cannot perish ingloriously.” The Austrian Kaiser
Franz Joseph wrote: “If we must go under, we better go under decently”
(from Herwig 1997: 11, 22, 37).
Far from optimism, their attitude is better described as rational
pessimism: they did not expect victory, but they did view the expected
payoff from remaining at peace as inferior to that from war. Thus Moltke
told Hötzendorff on 12 May 1914: “To wait any longer means a
diminishing of our chances” (from Herwig 1997: 51). Bethmann Holweg
to Kurt Riezler, 7 July 2014: “Russia’s military power growing fast …
Austria grows ever weaker … The future belongs to Russia, which grows
and grows into an ever greater weight pressing down on our chest” (from
Erdmann 1972: 181-93).
Could the Great War have been avoided? The case continues to be
made that avoidance of war in such circumstances can be achieved by
7
mediation and accommodation. Gideon Rachman, for example, has
contrasted “Munich” and “Sarajevo”:
If leaders warn against “another Munich”, they are almost always
advocating a tough response to aggression – usually military action. If
they speak of “Sarajevo”, however, they are warning against a drift to
war.6
From the perspective of managing China’s rise, Rachman continued:
This year’s centenary of the outbreak of the first world war could do
the world a great service by persuading modern politicians to spend
more time thinking about Sarajevo, and less time worrying about
Munich.
But this assumes the Great War was the “inadvertent” conflict of
legend. In fact there was no drift, no lack of foresight, communication,
realism, or calculation. There was no lack of mediation. In the July crisis
the British government made repeated offers to mediate, but in Berlin
these were seen as a complication, and German responses were designed
only to avoid public blame for the onset of war when it came.
Rather, war came in 1914, unlike in previous crises, because in that
moment the great powers did not deter each other. From this perspective
the reality of 1914 looks not unlike 1939, when only a credible deterrent
might have stopped Hitler in his tracks. As Margaret Macmillan (2013:
503-4) has shown, the Victorians understood deterrence perfectly well.
War broke out in August 1914 because, in that moment unlike all the
preceding moments, the Austrian and German governments were
insufficiently deterred. There was an added problem in 1914, because
rational pessimism changes the balance of fear: there is no value in
waiting and no merit in avoiding risky actions if you fear the future more
than you fear your enemies. This is a problem that we may face again
today with declining regimes in Moscow and Pyongyang.
In 1914 there was also a deeper cause of war. This was the
confinement of decision making to secretive councils where the national
interest was understood on the basis of military beliefs and values. In
business and society, no one wanted war. As Max Warburg told the
Kaiser: “Germany becomes stronger with every year of peace. We can only
gather rewards by biding our time” (from Herwig 2011: 13).
“Time to think more about Sarajevo, less about Munich,” Financial
Times, January 6, 2014. See also Skidelsky (2003).
6
8
Empirically, open political systems that aggregate widely held social
preferences and exercise civilian control over military authority appear to
engage in warfare more reluctantly and so more selectively than their
authoritarian counterparts (Levy 1988). There can be adverse side
effects; for example, democracies might be inhibited from undertaking
decisive military action that would deter aggression by others. Thus a
world where democracies and non-democracies coexist is not necessarily
more peaceful. It seems beyond dispute, nonetheless, that if German and
Austrian councils had given due weight to middle and working class
opinions in 1914 there would have been no Great War.
Myth #2. Needless slaughter
The Great War took place in an era of mass armies. This era began in the
1860s, when the railway technology first enabled the assembly and
deployment of multi-million armies (Onorato et al 2012), and ended in
the 1970s when battlefield nuclear weapons and cruise missiles deprived
the same mass armies of their viability.
Angell and Bloch warned that warfare in the age of mass armies would
be militarily horrendous and economically and socially unbearable. In this
they were partially correct: the wars were certainly horrible, but
European societies proved all too capable of carrying unprecedented war
mobilizations for years at a time.
The focal point of the Great War was conflict between Germany and
Russia, triggered by the gradual disintegration of the Austrian and
Ottoman Empires. In fact, this was the point of the war: Germany went to
war in the West, only in order to secure the conditions of victory in the
East. In this sense there is an exact parallel between the two World Wars.
The two wars differ, however, in where the outcome was decided. In
the Second World War, the Eastern front was decisive: this is where the
main forces were concentrated and the main battles were fought. In the
first World War, in contrast, the decisive engagements took place on the
Western front. In fact, Germany won in the East, and was then defeated in
the West.
In the West, the decisive conflict took the form of a war of attrition.
The original German war plan was for an offensive across Belgium and
France, ending in destruction of the French army within six weeks.
Although the French Army suffered its worst losses of the war, it did not
collapse, dug in, and was quickly buttressed by a small British
expeditionary force.
Britain went to war with a strategy of attrition, which required the
immediate raising of a mass army. At first there was no intention to send
the new army into battle on the Western front to kill and be killed;
9
Kitchener planned to wait, perhaps until 1917, while the French and the
Russians wore the Germans down, and then intervene with “the last
million men” that would decide the war (French 1982; Bourne 2005:
129).
As things turned out, however, before 1914 was over the British Army
was fully engaged. The first, second, and third millions went to war long
before 1917. Once the front line of trenches and dugouts settled into
place, attrition became the norm. Attrition is an ugly word, designed to
conceal the attempt to exchange wounds and deaths with the adversary at
a favourable rate. Generals on both sides accepted casualties on a scale
unthinkable by modern standards in the hope that the enemy’s loss would
be greater. On an average day of a war that lasted more than four years,
more than 6,000 soldiers died of all nationalities, including 2½ thousand
of the Central Powers and 3½ thousand of the Allies (from Urlanis 1971:
209). Britain’s worst day was the first on the Somme, 1 July 1916, with
20,000 killed and missing.
Attrition was a reality; was it pointless? That idea was founded on two
rates of exchange: lives for lives, and lives for territory. Lives for territory:
In most battles on the western front until 1918 only a few yards changed
hands for thousands or tens of thousands of casualties.7 Lives for lives:
When the Allied armies traded with the enemy, they consistently came off
worse. Figure 2 reports British and German casualties in the British sector
as monthly averages. It separates the 16 months from Neuve Chapelle to
before the Somme, and the 29 months from the Somme to the Armistice.
Two things are clear. First British losses rose greatly with the forces
deployed. Second, British losses consistently exceeded those of the
adversary in the same sector: by nearly two to one in the first period and
still by 1.5 to one in the second. (The time profile of French losses is
something of a mystery – to me, at least – and are a gap in this paper.)
At that rate, the Allied policy of attrition was irrational. When
Falkenhayn launched the battle of Verdun in February 1916, he expected
What a difference a few yards make! On an average day of World
War II the Red Army alone suffered 5,000 deaths in combat or behind the
front line (from figures reported by Barber and Harrison 2006: 225). The
defeat of Hitler’s Wehrmacht still took almost four years, so that average
day came around 1,416 times. Yet Stalin’s generals are mostly
remembered as heroes, not donkeys. One reason may be that their men
took Vasilevskii, Zhukov, and Kon’ev more than 2,000 kilometres from
Stalingrad to Berlin. But an emphasis on movement is to mistake the
purpose of combat. Its purpose is not to take territory or even to achieve
local breakthroughs but to destroy the enemy’s fighting power. The fact is
that fewer lives were spent in the destruction of Germany’s fighting
power in World War I than in World War II.
7
10
to lose two of his own men for five French soldiers. He would drain
France of blood (Herwig 1997: 182). Germany, not Britain, would have
the last million.
Did the Allied generals see this? The British commanders’ alleged
failure to learn is embodied in Alan Clark’s (1961) invented epithet:
“Lions led by donkeys.” Niall Ferguson (1998: 242-281) has also
maintained that, given their great advantage over the Central Powers in
economic capability, the Allies’ failure to win the war more quickly must
be explained by disorganization and incompetence: an “advantage
squandered.”
In fact, commanders on both sides made repeated efforts to escape the
logic of attrition. The problem was that every effort seemed to come to
nothing. In the category of efforts intended to save lives on the Western
front fell the artillery preparations with which Allied commanders
preceded major attacks (ineffective more often than not), Churchill’s
attack on the underbelly of the Central Powers via the Dardanelles (a
costly failure), the Allied blockade of Germany (slow acting at best), and
German submarine attacks on Allied and neutral shipping (arguably
ineffective and certainly counter-productive in bringing America into the
war).
If these escapes from attrition led nowhere, it was also dangerous to
retreat into passivity. This was the insight of the sociologist Tony
Ashworth (1980: 204-226). Left alone, he observed, the soldiers on both
sides of the trenches lapsed into “live and let live”. Between the great
offensives, the commanders could choose to let their men to keep their
heads down, or keep them on the alert by means of regular raids across
the front line to gather intelligence and take prisoners. Raiding was costly,
and increased casualties on both sides, and so stimulated hostile feeling;
passivity emphasized the adversaries’ shared interest in keeping violence
at the level of harmless ritual. Ashworth concluded that the British
preference for frequent raiding may explain why the British did not suffer
the mutinies that spread through the French army in 1917.
Beyond the tragic loss of life, attrition had a further consequence: it
interacted with the rapid expansion of the armies on both sides to lock
them into a vicious circle of declining quality. But this was more
important for the British than for others.
At the outbreak of war, the British sent a small, well-trained, and
experienced army to France. Within a few weeks the survivors had been
decimated by losses from their own ranks, and further diluted by the
much larger numbers of fresh recruits. The number of survivors from
each attack was critically important because the task of further learning
and improvement fell to them (Griffith 1996: 3; Corrigan 2003: 274-276).
As Figure 3 illustrates, in seven months from Mons to Neuve Chapelle (in
11
February 1915) the monthly survival probability of British officers and
men was more than 90 percent; but in the rapidly growing British army
the monthly average share of those that had survived at least one month
in France was little more than 60 percent.
The figure plots these two statistics, the survival rates and survivor
shares, through the war for the British and German armies. The Germany
army was affected by the same logic, but to a much smaller degree,
because it entered the war on the Western front already at one third of its
wartime maximum, rather than zero in the British case. As can be seen, in
every period the British army was disadvantaged. The men’s survival rate
was lower, and the survivor share was lower. For both armies the gap
between the survival and the survivor share tended to close as the size of
the army in the field stabilized, but the gap was initially far wider for the
British army, and it closed in the final period of the war only at the
expense of a declining survival rate.
Based on manpower alone, a strategy of attrition was self-defeating:
the Allies could have expected to lose the war. Kitchener’s last million
(men) turned out to come from America, which no one anticipated in
1914. During the war, however, the solution to attrition presented itself,
and the Allies were better able to grasp this solution than the Central
Powers. The solution on the Western front would be broken not by
manpower but by firepower. Additional firepower was supplied by the
Allied economies, which were incomparably richer than those of the
Central Powers. First to grasp this was Lloyd George, who echoed
Kitchener in 1915 by claiming that Britain would raise the “last million”
(pounds) that would win the war (Macdonald 2006: 403).
The balance of economic advantage is easily illustrated. Figure 4 offers
a gross comparison of the Allied advantage in prewar GDP and
population, and in men mobilized in wartime. It is a snapshot, rather than
a moving picture, so it rolls up Russian and American resources into a
single number, ignoring the fact that Russia was dropping out as America
came in. Still, these were the resources available. Allied GDP was more
than three times that of the Central Powers; population more than twice;
men mobilized more than one and a half times. Figure 5 shows a similar
comparison limited specifically to war production. In tanks (especially),
airplanes, machine guns and rifles, the Allies comfortably outproduced
the Central Powers; only in artillery did they fall short.
It was in the economic dimension of attrition that the stalemate was
broken, leading to Allied victory. Their economic advantage allowed the
Allies to compensate for heavy casualties by superior accumulation and
diversification of firepower (Prior and Wilson 1992; Strachan 2003).
Allied artillery bombardments became effective against opposing
trenches when intensified above a calculable threshold. Allied
12
infantrymen were re-equipped with offensive weapons such as rifle
grenades, trench mortars, and portable machine guns, and were
supported by growing numbers of airplanes and tanks. Taken together
these allowed the infantry to return to the principles of fire-andmovement. What made this possible was the vast dimensions of the Allied
production mobilization; and also American reinforcement in 1917 which
added a million men (but with little experience), and some elements of
firepower (but with little heavy artillery) (War Office 1922: 628).
A vital feature of resource mobilization for the Great War is that it
took time on both sides. The importance of time is easily illustrated. Think
of the war in two halves, separated in the middle of 1916. This appears
natural from a British perspective, because the battle of the Somme,
which opened on 1 July 1916, became the iconic engagement of the
British Army in the Great War, based on its terrible casualties and
minimal gains.
Griffith (1994) called the war after the Somme the “larger second half
of the war.”8 A surprising aspect is by just how much it was larger than
the first half in every dimension. In Figure 2 and 3 we saw already how
the numbers of soldiers mounted through the war, so that casualties of
the second half in the British sector outweighed those of the first half by
an order of magnitude. In the second half of the war the Somme was no
longer an exceptional engagement. Using two separate estimates (one
official, the other by Griffith), Figure 6 illustrates how the number of
division-level battles involving British forces rose rapidly, month after
month from 1915 through 1916 and 1917 to the end of the war. By the
end of the war, moreover, the resources being deployed in every battle
exceeded those of earlier battles by large multiples. This was enabled, in
turn, by very large increases in combat stocks. At the time of the Somme
offensive, on 9 July 1916, the British Army held more than 6.5 million
shells in France and a further 1.1 million at home. By the time of the 1918
spring offensive, on 9 February, the equivalent numbers were 16.5 million
and 11.3 million (War Office 1922: 481).
Behind this lay the expansion of production, illustrated in Figure 7. In
the 30 months from the Somme to the end of 1918, British industry
produced more than twice as many rifles, more than 5 times the number
of shells, 9 times the number of machine guns and aircraft, and 33 times
the number of tanks compared with the similar period up to the Somme.
Griffith also noted an “early-war bias” in history and literature, based
on the time of “amateurism, blundering, and fumbling” when most of the
serious fighting was left to the French, and most of the poetry was written
(and perhaps the poets were able to write it because the British sector
was quiet most of the time).
8
13
Not surprisingly, there was an answering mobilization on the German
side, most notably the “Hindenburg plan” of war-industry construction
adopted in August 1916; the best account in English, almost half a century
old, is still that of Feldman (1966). Our quantitative picture of the German
industrial mobilization over time remains lamentably incomplete,
however. Figure 8 infers from somewhat incomplete evidence that the
monthly rate of explosive powder production in Germany between the
Somme and the Armistice was most likely around three times the monthly
rate of the period before July 1916 (the horizontal axis of this figure is
scaled to match that of Figure 7). Another focus of the Hindenburg plan
was on artillery. It is known that over the war period as a whole Germany
alone outproduced the Allies in guns (including both Russia and the USA),
but we lack the timing of this achievement. Other data reported in the
figure put Germany’s submarine construction after the Somme at around
twice the rate beforehand. These numbers, while not spectacular, are
evidence of German success to compare with that of the Allies.
Three things clearly undermine the German economic record,
however. First, the German production programme clearly neglected the
airplanes and tanks that could give supporting cover to the attacking
infantry and would prove decisive in 1918.
Second, under the Hindenburg plan huge efforts went into building
new explosive and gun factories, and these took the German economy into
the realm of excessive mobilization. By the middle of 1917, wrote German
interior minister Karl Helfferich (cited by Feldman 1966: 273), there
were:
everywhere half-finished and finished factories that cannot produce
because there is no coal and there are no workers available. Coal and
iron were expended for these constructions, and the result is that
munitions production would be greater today if no monster
programme had been set up but rather production had been
demanded according to the capacities of those factories already
existing.
Third, the industrial mobilization precipitated the disintegration of the
German economy, the collapse of living standards, and an urban famine,
the causes of which we will consider further below. As a result Germany
could not reap the dividend from the collapse of the Eastern front. By
1918 more than 2 million men available for military service were being
held back from the front to work in Germany, alongside thousands of
soldiers returned from the front (Bessel 1988: 24-25). By this point the
Germany Army had too many guns for the men available to fight, and still
not enough food (Herwig 1997: 264, 410). On one hand “the new artillery,
14
trench mortars, and machine guns rusted on loading docks.” On the other
hand, the troops were afflicted by “hunger and thirst,” which drove them
through the year’s spring offensive: as they advanced they quickly
exhausted their own supplies, which they made up by looting the
abundance that they found in Allied stockpiles, but the search for food
and wine slowed the advance.
In short attrition worked, not in the generals’ understanding of it,
which was indeed narrow-minded and pre-modern (Offer 1989: 352), but
in Lloyd George’s concept: When the financial and industrial strength of
the central powers was finally exhausted, the Allies still had the last
million.
Should the Allied victory have come sooner? Ferguson (1998) argued
that, given their material advantage, the Allies should have won in two
years. Evidently “the Germans were significantly better at mobilizing their
economy for war than the Western powers.” The Allied advantage, he
concluded, was squandered.
There is some merit in this line of thinking. The British army of 1914
had to face a new problem – but the problem should not have been
thought of as completely new because it had been encountered before in
the American Civil War and the Boer War. Could the Allied economic
mobilization have benefited by learning from these earlier experiences of
mass warfare? Yes (according to Trebilcock 1975). There is clear evidence
that the Allied commanders’ learning from experience was slow and
unaccountably erratic; should they have been quicker to learn how to use
their material advantage without wasteful losses? Again, yes (according to
Prior and Wilson 1992; see also Griffith 1994: 192-200). It seems the
British Army, at least, lacked the analytical capability to learn
systematically from experience. The German Army was a more innovative
and effective combat organization. It is true that the British Army, the
only one not to be broken by its own offensives, was transformed by
1918, but the transformation could have been quicker and many lives
would then have been saved.
It is unreasonable to conclude, however, that the German economy
was better organized. On the contrary, the German generals that ran the
domestic war effort from 1916 made some terrible mistakes. They ended
up with war factories they could not supply or operate, and soldiers and
civilians they could not feed. Lacking the advantage of material
superiority, these were mistakes they could not afford.
In a paper summarizing our joint work on the subject, however,
Broadberry and Harrison (2005b) concluded: “Total war takes time.”
Learning from defeat, building and training armies, equipping the army
with new weapons, and equipping industry to supply the weapons: these
things all took years. Both sides mobilized, but neither side fully
15
anticipated the additional efforts that would be required to match the
other’s mobilization. The war eventually drained economies of resources
in reverse order of their strength, so Russia first, then Austria and
Germany. There was also error and wastage. Clausewitz (1968: 167)
would have recognized these as no more than the “friction” that makes
war “a resistant medium for every activity.” Those who decide over war
and peace must anticipate the tragedies, crimes, and mistakes that go
with war and also serve, incidentally, to prolong it.
Why, exactly, was the war so bloody? The mass killing of soldiers in
the Great War is sometimes ascribed to the advantage of the defenders. At
first, attacking infantry could not suppress machine guns and barbed
wire. Heavy artillery could do this, but how to do it was poorly
understood. The result was a static war in which territory rarely changed
hands. The entrenched armies exchanged terrible casualties whenever
they left the relative safety (Strachan 2003) of the trenches and dugouts.
This situation began to change late in the war. In 1917/18 the
offensive began to regain the advantage. Attacking infantry acquired more
versatile weapons and more intensive support. The result was that
warfare became mobile again, and once again territory changed hands
first this way, then that. As fighting moved into the open, however,
casualties rose.
In the next war it was easier to attack than defend. From the start,
infantry everywhere engaged in fire-and-movement, supported by
aircraft and tanks. The result was mobile warfare on a global scale. It is
notable that military casualties of World War II tragically exceeded those
of World War I by a large margin. The conclusion is inescapable that mass
killing did not arise from being immobilized in trenches or from
unimaginative military leaders too stupid to think their way around the
obstacles. The casualties that arose when warfare became mobile were
even higher. Mass killing was the result of warfare in the era of mass
armies, not from the particular form it took in the Great War.
To conclude, in the Great War, despite material advantage, the Allies
could not escape the war of attrition. Attrition meant slaughter. Some of
this slaughter was the kind of pointless, wasteful killing that happens in
every war. The rest of it was the killing demanded by mass warfare.
Attrition was not only slaughter, however. There was an economic
dimension as well as the military one. It was the combined attrition in
both dimensions that defeated the Central Powers.
Myth #3. The food weapon
Food was an essential element of two world wars (Collingham 2011).
Moreover, food security was a core element of German war preparations
16
(Lee 1975). Despite such preparations, many believed, Germany was
strangled by the British (later Allied) blockade. The food weapon
appeared to have been decisive: Germany was starved into submission.
This belief has historic significance. After the war it helped to sustain
the notion (attributed to Germany’s wartime leaders Hindenburg and
Ludendorff) that Germany remained unbeaten militarily; the army was
betrayed when the home front folded. The memory of the blockade also
ran deep in the national socialists’ project to restructure Europe in
Germany’s interest by force, as when Hitler (cited by Collingham 2011:
37) remarked in 1939: “I need the Ukraine, so that no one is able to starve
us again, like in the last war.”
The idea that Germany was starved into defeat is highly plausible,
although it would have astonished prewar observers. At the outbreak of
war Germany imported 20-25 percent of calories for human
consumption; for Britain the equivalent number was 60 percent. It was
natural for Angell and Bloch to suppose that in wartime British
consumers would suffer first.
In prewar 1913, as Figure 9 suggests, the average British and German
diets were quite comparable. In the outcome British food supplies were
constrained and their average composition deteriorated somewhat. As the
same figure shows, however, the decline of food availability to Germans
was much more severe.
In Britain sugar was rationed from the end of 1917 and various meats
and fats during 1918. The access of low-income families to food improved
somewhat, so there was a degree of equalization (Gazeley and Newall
2013); this seems more likely attributable to the high demand for all
kinds of labour than to rationing itself. In Germany price ceilings and
rationing were introduced in 1916 for bread and flour, meat, fats, and oil.
Food rationing supplied only 50-60 percent of required calories, so
everyone had to go to unofficial sources to survive. In this setting the
wealthy had the advantage. Based on average height of soldiers born
before and during World War I, the war saw both an average decline and
an increase in inequality (Blum 2013). Excess mortality among German
civilians is estimated at around 750,000, most likely because of hunger
and hunger-related disease (Davis and Engerman 2006: 204).
Two factors confound this story. One is simple: Germany went to war
with its principal trading partners. Angell and Bloch had argued forcefully
that great powers heavily dependent on trade should not attack the
sources of their own prosperity. But this is exactly what Germany did
(and Shinzo Abe was right to note the fact). The German economy was
much more interlinked with its future adversaries than its future allies. In
1913, Britain, France, Italy, and Russia accounted for 36 percent of
17
prewar German trade (Gartzke and Lupu 2012: 131).9 The same figure for
Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire was only 12 percent.
Britain alone accounted for a bigger share of Germany’s trade than the
latter combined. Russia was a major source of German food and animal
fodder. From this perspective, Alan Kramer (2013) has pointed out, much
of the “blockade” was no more than an Allied decision not to trade with
the enemy. No blockade was necessary to interrupt trade across no man’s
land.
Germany’s loss of trade, however, was not the only supply shock.
Prewar plans for wartime autarky assumed that German farmers would
have to farm more intensively to feed the nation (Lee 1975), but the war
mobilization stripped German farms of young men, horses, and chemicals.
Further shocks came from farmers’ incentives. At the same time that
battlefronts and blockades cut off food imports across open borders, war
mobilization restricted the domestic supply of manufactured goods to the
rural market. Although food prices soared, farmers retreated to the inside
option of self-sufficiency. When civilian officials stepped in to control
prices, the attraction of the inside option only increased.
In his economic history of the war Gerd Hardach (1987: 34) asked
how economic warfare interacted with Germany’s economic mobilization.
He conjectured that:
“The tremendous economic decline of the Central Powers between
1914 and 1918 was caused less by the blockade than by the excessive
demands made on their economies by the war.”
Hardach did not suggest how to implement this comparison, but there
is a simple way to consider its possible validity in the German market for
food calories. Start from the fact that before the war Germany imported
up to one quarter of calories for human consumption. Note that there
were two welfare losses, one arising from the trade shock affecting the
quarter that was imported and the other arising from the mobilization
shock affecting the three quarters produced at home. Is it reasonable to
suppose that the loss from the shock affecting the one quarter was
smaller than the shock affecting the three quarters?
Figure 10 separates the wartime increases in the price of calories that
are attributable to the curtailment of foreign trade and to the internal
mobilization. The resulting welfare losses correspond to two triangles.
While the height of each triangle cannot be ascertained, its base is known.
The welfare loss from the blockade (ABC) was proportional to prewar
Fergsuon (1998: 253) gives a higher figure for the share of
Germany’s prewar imports from wartime adversaries: 48 per cent.
9
18
trade, whereas the loss from mobilization (OCD) was proportional to
prewar consumption. Since trade in calories was at most one quarter of
prewar consumption, and not all trade was cut off, it follows that the
welfare loss from mobilization was likely to have exceeded the loss from
the blockade by a multiple.10
We do not count the welfare loss arising from price ceilings and
rationing on the grounds that these were largely ineffective. On the
evidence of Blum (2013) they redistributed welfare adversely, but are
best ignored for present purposes.
Finally, it is worth noting, the blockade of Germany continued through
the armistice to Germany’s acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles in June
1919 and, extended to the Baltic, became even tighter. With the fighting
over and German soil under German control, trade sanctions were now
the Allies’ only coercive lever to ensure that Germany came to terms. The
postwar blockade was bitterly unpopular in Germany and its continuation
became a source of lasting resentment. Yet, as Offer (1989: 388-391)
reports, prices did not rise and rations did not fall. The most obvious
explanation is that the end of military mobilization allowed some
dishoarding.
It was both plausible and convenient for politicians of the war period
and later to blame German’s wartime economic difficulties on the Allied
blockade. This must be largely a myth. The blockade was not the only
factor in the disruption of German trade. The disruption of trade was not
the only factor that disrupted the German internal market for food.
Arguably, the military mobilization of agricultural resources into war, and
the economic mobilization of industry, had a larger disruptive effect than
the shock from foreign trade.
Myth #4. Folly at Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 and the Reparations Commission that it
established imposed heavy burdens on Germany. Having witnessed the
negotiations Keynes (1920) strongly criticized the process on two
grounds: it violated the terms of the Armistice (which limited German
reparations to making good civilian damages arising from the war) and
the resulting burden on the German economy was intolerable and would
be counterproductive.
Keynes may well have been right; the reparations burden was
evidently intolerable since successive German governments did not
tolerate it. But what in fact were the consequences?
10
This line of argument has a precedent in Williamson (1968: 21-23).
19
Many serious consequences have been ascribed to the indemnity
imposed on Germany in 1921. According to the financier and
philanthropist George Soros (2014), for example, to the French
“insistence on reparations led to the rise of Hitler.” There are present-day
implications for, Soros continues, “Angela Merkel’s [similar] policies are
giving rise to extremist movements in the rest of Europe.”
The German hyperinflation of 1923 has also been attributed to
reparations. According to Brookings vice-president (formerly a Turkish
government minister and UN administrator) Kemal Derviş (2014), “had
Germany’s hyperinflation of the 1920’s – a direct result of the war – been
avoided, Hitler may well never have risen to power.”
The burden of German reparations determined in 1921 was certainly
heavy and probably unwisely so. The evidence is plain to see in the better
outcome of 1945, when the victors based retribution on evidence of
personal culpability, not collective responsibility. Still, the mistakes of
1919 to 1921 should be kept in perspective.
In 1921 the Reparations Commission issued A, B, and C bonds, of
which the C bonds were designed symbolically to appease various Allied
constituencies; only the A and B bonds were held to be within Germany’s
ability to pay. The A and B bonds together have been valued at about one
year’s prewar German GDP (Ritschl 2005: 68-70). This was comparable to
the French indemnities of 1815 and 1871 (White 2001). Taking into
account Germany’s Treaty losses of territory and capacity, and adding
non-reparations obligations to the Allies, Webb (1986) estimates the
current burden at around 10 percent of Germany’s postwar GDP.
Alternatively, Ritschl adds the A and B bonds to Germany’s existing public
debt to find a total of around 1.5 times Germany’s GDP, which looks heavy
but not overwhelming when compared with the sovereign debt liabilities
of France and the United Kingdom in 1921 (2.6 and 1.5 times GDP
respectively).11
Germany’s centre-left government did not want to pay reparations out
of taxes. The problem was not the burden of attempted compliance; the
problem was that Germany did not comply. The clash with the Allies led,
in early 1923, to the French occupation of the Ruhr in an attempt to
extract reparations in kind by compulsion. The German government
wrote another blank cheque, this time to fund the efforts of the local
population to frustrate collection. As Webb (1986) has described, the
anticipation of unbounded future fiscal deficits triggered hyperinflation.
Data by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff at
http://www.reinhartandrogoff.com/data/ (accessed 23 February 2014).
11
20
Notably, however, there cannot have been any unique channel from
German reparations to hyperinflation because the hyperinflation of the
time was not unique to Germany. As Keynes (1920: 223) presciently
remarked, “The inflationism of the currency systems of Europe has
proceeded to extraordinary lengths. The various belligerent
Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from
loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the
balance.” Hyperinflation was a regional phenomenon, spreading beyond
Germany through Russia, Poland, the Baltic, Austria, and Hungary
(Bresciani-Turroni 1937; Dornbusch 1991; Harrison and Markevich
forthcoming). Throughout central and eastern Europe, fragile
governments presiding over newly constituted nations spent beyond
their means, and compliant central bankers monetized the resulting
debts.
To generalize, every case of hyperinflationary meltdown of that time
began from a civil war of attrition (in the game-theory political-economy
sense of Alesina and Drazen 1991) among domestic interests that prefer
to postpone stabilization in the hope of shifting the burdens of
stabilization disproportionately onto others. The only aspect unique to
Germany was the foreign dimension: as external bondholders the Allies
had a hand in the German game.
The story that links reparations to hyperinflation does not flow,
therefore, from the consequences of Germany’s meeting an intolerable
obligation; rather, all the effort on the German side went into avoidance
(Marks 1978). A new war of attrition followed between the German and
Allied governments, and the hyperinflation was a predictable
consequence, triggered when holders of Mark-denominated government
liabilities began to anticipate unbounded future government deficits.
After stabilization came the first of many reschedulings. There was
also a peace dividend. Hantke and Spoerer (2010) note something that
Keynes and others entirely neglected: the Treaty provisions that limited
German interwar rearmament gave Germany fiscal breathing space.
Restrictions on the size and equipment of Germany’s armed forces
reduced the burden of military spending. In equilibrium they probably
reduced military spending across Europe. To estimate the peace dividend
requires a counterfactual hypothesis which is not straightforward, but in
Hantke and Spoerer’s most conservative scenario it was large enough to
cover at least 90 per cent of the reparations actually paid in the years
from 1924 to 1929.
If the economic implications of the Treaty have been oversold, the
same is true of its political consequences. The electoral history of the
Weimar Republic may conveniently be broken into three phases: 1919 to
1924 (with four parliamentary elections), a period that included the
21
imposition of the Treaty of Versailles, the announcement of reparations,
the hyperinflation, and the first rescheduling of reparations under the
Dawes Plan; 1925 to 1929 (including the election of May 1928), a period
of stability that ended with the Great Depression and another
rescheduling of reparations under the Young Plan; and 1930 to 1933
(with four more elections) ending in the Hitler dictatorship.
Figure 11 shows the evolving pattern of proportional representation
in the German parliament. In the first phase the parties of the centre and
left lost support dramatically, their vote share falling by 30 percent
between February 1919 and June 1920. The votes were picked up on both
far left and right by parties opposed to the new republic, some because
they wanted the monarchy back, others because they supported Soviet
revolution. As yet, neither the Treaty nor the reparations were known
quantities. In the May1924 elections, in the wake of the hyperinflation,
the national socialists put in a first showing, winning nearly 7 per cent of
the seats. But at the same support for the centre-left was recovering. At
the second 1924 election the extremists’ vote collapsed and that of the
centre-left was further consolidated.
In May 1928, three and a half years later, despite a background of
continued agitation on the reparations issue, the grip of the centre-left
was still stronger; the communists gained little ground and support for
the national socialists remained below 3 percent.
It was not until the hammer blow of the Great Depression that
conditions were laid for violent polarization and the breakthrough of the
radical right to national significance and power (Van Riel and Schram
1993; King et al. 2008).
In other words, from the Dawes Plan to the Great Depression the
German electorate showed a substantial and growing majority for
constitutional rule by the “Weimar parties.” Were it not for the Great
Depression, Hitler and his infamous co-conspirators would have lived to
the 1960s and died in obscurity in their beds.
In setting out to punish Germany for the war the authors of the Treaty
of Versailles lacked wisdom and enlightened self-interest. Contemporary
critics of the Treaty in Germany and abroad made the most of this. But it
is wrong to look here for the causes of the Hitler dictatorship and World
War II. It was in the middle of defeat that the German high command
launched the Fatherland Party demanding peace with annexations East
and West (Howard 2002: 98), but it was still September 1918, before the
Armistice and long before the Peace. And it was in the expectation of an
early victory that Bethmann Holweg proposed the “September
programme” to restructure Europe as a German empire (Hastings 2013:
100), in September 1914 when the war going well, not 1919 when
Germany had been saddled with “war guilt” and reparations, and not
22
1924 when hyperinflation had done its worst. It was the end of the war,
not the terms of the peace, that Germany’s far right would not accept.
The most that can be said against the Treaty of Versailles is that it did
not help. It was bad diplomacy and, given what diplomacy is supposed to
achieve, that is bad enough.
Concluding remarks
We have reviewed four widespread narratives of the Great War. Each is at
the crossroads of economics, politics, and strategy. Myths are not
necessarily baseless, and we have tried to distinguish truthful elements,
but their part in the overall story was often relatively small.
According to one myth the Great War was an inadvertent conflict; it
transpired without intention or calculation. In fact, the decisions that led
to the Great War were calculated with considerable foresight of the wider
costs and consequences. The spirit of those that started the war is usefully
defined as “rational pessimism.”
Another myth considers that most fighting on the Western front took
the form of needless attrition. There was attrition, and this was a
deliberate strategy on both sides. From the Allied standpoint this looks
scarcely rational because the rate of exchange of casualties was always
adverse. The missing dimension was economic: the “last million” was
measured in firepower as well as manpower. The Allies outproduced the
Central Powers in firepower (and everything else) and this was the basis
of victory. But there was no escape from attrition, and no other way of
winning the war but by the sacrifice of millions of lives.
A myth of historic significance is that the Allies used food as a weapon
to starve Germany out of the war. While German civilians suffered greatly,
in part because of the Allied blockade hurt, it seems likely that German
actions hurt more. These included the decision to attack Germany’s main
trading partners, the impact of Germany’s economic mobilization on the
internal food market, and the overblown scale of the Hindenburg plan.
A final myth is that the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded World
War I, laid the foundations for World War II. Many aspects of the Treaty of
Versailles would seem to fail the test of enlightened self-interest on the
Allied side. Despite this, the electoral impact of the Treaty, the
reparations, and the hyperinflation of 1923 were short lived. In the mid1920s and as late as the Reichstag elections of 1928, German society was
set on a course to political moderation and stability.
The Great Depression, which struck Germany in 1929, then brought
back to life the dark forces of radical nationalism that led to World War II.
These forces were engendered long before World War I. Let loose by the
war, they were caged by the German defeat and Weimar democracy put
23
them into a coma. The Treaty of Versailles, foolish or not, set the terms of
the peace. They stirred, but slept on. It was the Great Depression that
reawakened them so that they sprang back to life.
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Figures
Figure 1. “Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it.”
Source: Bairnsfather (1917). Thanks to Major and Mrs Holt, Bairnsfather's
biographers, for permission to reproduce this image.
29
Figure 2. British and German military deaths on the Western front, British
sector, monthly average, before and after the Somme
Source: Calculated from War Office (1922: 358-362).
30
Figure 3. Total British and German military personnel and monthly
casualties, survival probabilities, and survivor shares on the Western front
Sources: British data are from War Office (1922, pp. 64(iii) and 253-271);
German data are from McRandle and Quirk (2006, pp. 682-685 and 696696). All figures relate to the first of the month. Numbers of British
officers and other ranks present on the first of September through
November 1914 are found by linear interpolation on the figure for 1
December 1914 and zero for 1 August; the same procedure is used for 1
May and 1 July 1916. German numbers for 1 August 1914 are found by
backward extrapolation from September and October.
For both armies, casualties are killed, died, wounded and sick, missing,
and prisoners.
The survival probability is the ratio of the actual number present on
the first of the current month to the gross number, where the latter is
defined as the number present on the first of the previous month plus
casualties over the month. A simplifying assumption is that men arriving
at the front within a given month did not become casualties until the next
month or later.
The survivor share is the ratio of the actual number present on the first
of the previous month to the gross number on the first of the current
month, using the same definition of gross number and the same
assumption as for survival probabilities.
31
Figure 4. The Allied material advantage: Prewar GDP and population and
wartime military mobilization
Sources: Prewar GDPs and populations from Broadberry and Harrison
(2005, pp. 7-8 and 10); men mobilized from Urlanis (1971: 209).
32
Figure 5. The Allied material advantage: cumulative wartime production
Sources: War production from Adelman (1988: 45), except UK from
Broadberry and Howlett (2005: 212) and Austria-Hungary from Schulze
(2005: 88).
33
Figure 6. Number of divisional battles on fought by British and Empire
forces on the Western front
Source: Totals are given by Griffith (1994: 18). Monthly averages are
calculated from the totals. Griffith describes the official figures (covering
British forces only) as "more exhaustive (or pedantic, if you will).”
34
Figure 7. British war production after the Somme, monthly average, ratio to
before the Somme
Source: Annual data from Broadberry and Howlett (2005: 212). Figures
for 1916 are distributed equally between the first and second halves of
the year.
35
Figure 8. German war production after the Somme, monthly average, ratio
to before the Somme
Sources: Explosive powder: Feldman (1966: 152-3, 268, 272, 494) gives
figures for December 1915 (4,000 tons), July 1916 (6,000 tons), February
1917 (6,400 tons), April 1917 (8,000 tons), May 1917 (9,200 tons), and
April 1918 (12,000 tons). I assume that these figures were selected
because they are salient, and I interpolate linearly between them. I take
1,000 tons as the monthly figure for August 1914, and I assume that a
monthly output of 12,000 tons (the target of the Hindenburg plan) was
maintained through November 1918. Submarines: Davis and Engerman
(2006: 232-233).
36
Figure 9. British and German food consumption, pounds per head per week,
1913 and 1918
Source: Davis and Engerman (2006: 210).
37
Figure 10. The Hardach conjecture: The German market for calories
Price
Demand
MC in wartime
D
Marginal cost (MC)
C
B
A
O
Qp
Blockade effect
Q*
Qc
World price
Quantity
Mobilization effect
38
Figure 11. Elections to the Reichstag, February 1919 to March 1933
Sources: 1920 to 1933 (Berghahn 1982: 284-285), supplemented by
figures for February 1919 from “German Federal Election, 1919” at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_1919 (accessed
23 February 2014). The German People’s Party (DVP) under Stresemann
is allocated to the centre from 1923 to 1929, and to the conservative
parties otherwise.